The dominant trend of activist organizing for 2020 has been the explosion of decentralized mutual aid networks, which has its origins in anarchist theories of social change. The idea is that once enough individual people begin to break away from hierarchical relationships to meet their every day needs, they will be able to abolish the state. Of course, this kind of organizing only exacerbates and entrenches informal hierarchies. A lot of this influence is coming from two sources: the state repression of party organizations and the compatibility of mutual aid as political practice with the individualist culture existing within the US.
Mutual aid attempts to distinguish itself from charity through a recognition on an individual participant level that the problem is systemic, not with the individual person. Charity within the US largely looks at the problems of society as a problem on an individual level. A common example is that a church identifies that someone needs food or clothes, so it clothes and feeds someone without critiquing the system that created these conditions. The proposed revolutionary qualities of mutual aid isn't coming from building collective power or community identity, it is coming from the individual identity as revolutionaries. The simple recognition of systemic injustice is supposed to automatically challenge the existence of that system. Here's one excerpt on the differences from a mutual aid advocate:
https://lilipoh.com/articles/mutual-aid-solidarity-not-charity-and-cooperation-for-the-sake-of-the-common-good/
An understanding that it is the system, not the people suffering under it, that creates poverty, crisis, and vulnerability
Governance/control by people who are most effected (can mean having a membership base of those most effected, or being formed in ways that ensure those providing the aid are from the same group as those giving the aid, or models that allow allies to participate but focus on accountability to those being served)
Transparency about how they work, any money they use or manage (many mutual aid projects are not funded and are all volunteer run)
Open meetings and pathways for new people to join and participate
Political education within the organization to help those working in the project to expand their awareness of experiences that are not their own, to build solidarity, and to make the project supportive and welcoming to marginalized people
Humility and willingness to accept feedback about how to make the project more useful to the people it serves
Long-term commitment to provide the aid the project works on
Connection to and solidarity with other mutual aid projects and other transformative work
Commitment to dignity and self-determination of people in need or crisis
Consensus-based decision making rather than majority rule
These qualities are entirely focused on the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the organizers. It shouldn't be any surprise that this method of organization has taken over the first world left. It has no threshold for success or failure because it isn't interested in actually making an impact against capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism. The left has retreated from revolutionary politics into a method of practice that is too small to fail. This individualized fear of failure is the single largest fear in psychological surveys, and this is absolutely driven by the mass marketing messages that use failure as an emotional button to press to encourage consumer buying decisions.
This is in contrast to survival programs done by party organizations. These survival programs are ultimately done within a larger political goal of building a collective identity and organization that can topple state power. Rather than focusing entirely on the individual level of the organizer or the recipient, survival programs are measured based on how well they move the conditions closer to revolution.
The antidote is to evaluate our choices and actions within the larger context of creating collective identity, not personal identity. The danger within the first world left is that this has historically been used in a nationalist, labor aristocratic way to support the imperialist state and assist in the parasitical plunder of the rest of the world.
Edited by pogfan1996 ()
filler posted:Could you elaborate on what differentiates building collective power/identity from individual self-expression? The list of qualities of mutual aid you posted seems like it has several points that would further collective power or identity if enacted in the right way (specifically "Governance/control by people who are most effected" and "Political education within the organization"), so I don't feel like I have a good grasp of the distinction you're trying to draw. Or is the difference just that the aid programs should be controlled by more explicitly political organizations?
The difference is really in the way they relate to society. I don't have an easy way to copy and paste it, but the Black Capitalism Re-Analyzed article in this BPP paper is really fantastic (about halfway down):
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/06%20no%2028%201-20%20aug%209%201971.pdf
It specifically calls out individualism, the relationship of survival programs to the Black community, and the impact of survival programs to their community. The success and failure of their programs is entirely based around how it transforms their community, not based on the individual enlightenment of organizers.
Within mutual aid organizations, political education isn't done with the idea of creating a collective revolutionary power base, it is done with the intent of reinforcing an individualist relationship to political work and society. Governance and control by people who are most effected is also not done to achieve the aim of community control of institutions, but rather regulates the individual relationships of organizers and beneficiaries.
marknat posted:In anyone familiar with the FTP/Serve the People orgs springing up? Are they survival programs or mutual aid? It looks from the outset they're doing cut and dry NGO charity work, but I'd like to be hopeful. I don't know if the MCP-OC has published any defenses of these programs as of yet...
Here’s some info if you want to learn more, I don’t know enough about MCP-OC to say anything
To be less of a sassy pants, I think (also from personal experience) that it can be more satisfying to talk like that than it is to identify where these organizations & movements & tendencies tie in to others in your locale and in a wider sense, are at odds with others, etc., good things to recognize even if you think the entire "left" is stinky doo doo. I don't just mean in the sense of "the left" vs. Marxist-Leninist parties or anything either, like, if you cast a wider net than even I might on the "left" with the best chance of proving this point, the entire crusty body of first-world left anarchism with all its tendencies isn't all part of mutual aid societies either and not all of them think they're a good idea even.
Well before this year, "mutual aid society" became a term used by a lot of different "left" groups, including some Marxists, for how they pool resources using different models of varying formality, often nowadays among people moving from perpetual underemployment or perpetual precarious employment to perpetual unemployment (and among those living nearby suffering the same), to alleviate problems in the short term. Meaning, in very simple ways that anyone would immediately recognize and that no one involved thinks of as a method to overthrow the government or a replacement for revolutionary analysis or practice or for militant action, short-term or long-term. It's like, they kept someone's heat on for the next month and that keeps us going, it builds trust among us and keeps us from having to expend time & energy later to look out for each other because we didn't do it now. It's not like, keeping someone's heat on for the next month advances implementation of our model for eliminating utility bills per the doctrine of mutual aid.
As far as the members thinking their knowledge of systemic problems wages mind-war against them, I mean... they usually don't think that if they're pooling money to keep someone's heat on in the winter. They almost certainly won't see themselves as a community-free group of individuals disconnected from those around them who each believe primarily in the importance of that one person's own revolutionary identity over, say, a good relationship with other people in the building or neighborhood. I've met anarchists & other "leftists" like that and they don't tend to join mutual aid societies. They're more likely only to show up when they have a chance to shout and throw things. Is what the members of mutual aid societies think and what they do always the same? Probably not, but isn't that what reasoning dialectically is supposed to provide us, the ability to analyze that objectively instead of identifying the issue by parsing internal motives as though they were distinct from the material world, as though ideology had no material grounding?
I know first-hand that there are groups that identify themselves as mutual aid societies today that don't think or act like those groups in any way lead to spontaneous dissolution of the state, and I don't think even a majority of such groups' members today would argue they replace forms of militant organization, let alone that "the simple recognition of systemic injustice is supposed to automatically challenge the existence of that system." Whether their militant organization and activity as part of neighboring groups is effective or not is another question, but it's certainly not disappeared or folded itself into "mutual aid" en masse. It's just the same question about that same militancy as it ever was, what it does or doesn't do, how it is or isn't informed by accurate knowledge of the world, etc.
Now I'm sure you know I don't think these groups are going to be an effective way to pursue revolutionary goals directly when compared to a party. Meaning I think a party can be effective at that, and these groups can't. But I don't think a lot of them have that as the particular goal of that particular group or see such a group as a replacement for organizations that pursue militant or revolutionary politics, correct or misguided as those politics are.
As with almost all of these sorts of terms, I think that when "mutual aid society" was something heard less frequently overall, it was more frequently and strictly tied to an ideology that identified what it described as: of a particular character defined by its original leading lights, as of primary importance, as the most effective fix for perceived problems in "the left", etc. Because at that point, the people who used it at all were mostly true believers closer to its source as a term. I don't think that's been the case for "mutual aid society" for a long time now.
Like:
The antidote is to evaluate our choices and actions within the larger context of creating collective identity, not personal identity. The danger within the first world left is that this has historically been used in a nationalist, labor aristocratic way to support the imperialist state and assist in the parasitical plunder of the rest of the world.
I think nearly every member of a mutual aid society anywhere would agree with the first sentence without argument, and the only reason fewer of them would agree with the second is that they either wouldn't know what "labor aristocratic" means or they would recognize it as a term used by their perceived political enemies and react with kneejerk hostility. Some significant amount of that last group, even, wouldn't disagree with the substance of it, even with the existence of a labor aristocracy if described to them through other terms.
Which doesn't make them right, smart or practical in the net sum of their activities or put their groups on par with what can be achieved through a party, but rather, it's that, if you're saying, That's the antidote... sure, but aren't you really saying the antidote is to build that collective identity through a Communist party? Because that's where things would get raised to those existing, meaningful disputes about militancy and revolutionary politics. And I'm not sure mutual aid societies have changed any of that in any real way, or even that they're representative of the sort of organizations today that try to disrupt revolutionary party politics or claim the same ground for themselves.